Sergio Larraín Echeñique is the best-known Chilean photographer of the last half-century but who is he and does he actually exist?
Miguel Ángel Felipe Fidalgo, a fellow Chilean who teaches history of photography and has written widely about image-making in the country, provides the answers in this edition's Close Up feature.
If it wasn't for the expressiveness of his unique and individual work, we could wonder whether photographer Sergio Larraín is real or fictional.
His physical presence has been rarely verified over the past 30 years.
History records Larraín's very close relationship with the world, a tendency to seclusion and his search for the meaning of life. He has lived in relative isolation in Ovalle, a small village well into the Andes Mountains and more than 400 kilometers north of his birthplace in 1931, Santiago de Chile.
There he devotes himself to study, writing, transcendental meditation and Zen Buddhism, keeping in touch with the outside world by letter.
The son of a distinguished Chilean architect and scholar, who introduced him to contemporary art during his childhood, Larraín created most of his work during a 20-year period between 1949 – when he briefly studied forest engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, before dropping out – and 1968.
It was then that he first encountered the teachings of the Bolivian master Óscar Ichazo, decided to quit photography and plunged into the study of Eastern culture and mystics.
During those two intense decades as a photographer, Larraín was influenced by such authors such as the Italian Giuseppe Cavalli, whom he started to admire during a youthful trip to Europe.
As a freelance photographer for many foreign magazines he held public exhibitions, got involved with Chilean charity institutions and sent his portfolio to the Photography Department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In response, Edward Steichen told Larraín he wanted to acquire two of his pictures.
In 1959, he was awarded a scholarship by the British Council and continued his work in the English capital. The same year, he was invited by Henri Cartier-Bresson to join Magnum Photos, which still distributes Larraín's work. Afterwards, he went to live in Paris for two years.
His images were published in widely-read magazines such as Paris-Match.
Returning to Chile in 1963, Larraín published his first book El rectángulo en la mano (The rectangle in hand), a small edition encouraged by the Brazilian poet Tiago de Melo, one of Pablo Neruda's friends.
The book, including twenty carefully-chosen pictures, is now hard-to-find and contains examples which typify his impressive work: wandering street children from Santiago, Valparaíso and London among other images from several series depicting the Latin American reality.
Miguel Ángel Felipe Fidalgo
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Sergio Larraín